Ubuntu – How to determine the OS architecture (32-bit or 64-bit) from a file on a disk

Architecture

Sadly my mobo went bad and I have to build a new machine from scratch. I don't recall if I originally loaded the 32 or the 64 bit version of the OS, (K)ubuntu 14.04.

If I mount the existing HDD is there a file I can examine to determine the OS architecture? Needs to be something more than the presence of a 64bit executable or library as these are not reliable ways to determine the running OS.

I cannot run uname -a as this is a mounted disk, not a running OS.

Best Answer

It is trivial to determine whether the host operating system has a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel by running:

uname --machine

An output of i386 means 32-bit and x86_64 means 64-bit.

It is less trivial, but still feasible to determine whether an application is compiled for the i386 or amd64 architecture but neither of these will indicate the architecture of the kernel. Even checking /sbin/init is not technically sufficient since the init program can be customized at boot time.

The only foolproof way to determine the architecture of the kernel is to actually boot it. Luckily this can easily be done using qemu.

Begin by opening a terminal and navigating to /boot on the hard drive. You will find one or more compressed kernel images in the form:

vmlinuz-[version]-[type]

For example, I have vmlinuz-3.19.0-21-generic present in /boot on my machine. Now, assuming you have the qemu-system-x86 Install qemu-system-x86 package installed, run the following command, substituting the filename where appropriate:

qemu-system-i386 -kernel <path_to_kernel>

If you see a wall of text scroll by and eventually panic (because the root FS is missing), you have installed a 32-bit kernel. If instead you receive an error similar to the one displayed below, you have a 64-bit kernel (which will not boot on an x86 CPU).

enter image description here

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to check if installed VLC is 64 bit or 32 bit

Using the file command from terminal:

file $(which vlc)

In my case the vlc version is 64-bit:

/usr/bin/vlc: ELF 64-bit LSB  executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically
linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24,
BuildID[sha1]=63a2c2e7d5b12db4ad69cc38da86622492649af9, stripped

Ubuntu – How to detect architecture of a .deb package

Create a script, in my example foo

#!/bin/bash

# Create a temporary folder in /tmp
dir=$(mktemp -d)

# Extract the deb file
dpkg -x "$1" "$dir"

printf "\n%s\n\n" "$1"

# Show the package architecture information
dpkg --info $1 | \
    awk '/Architecture/ {printf "defined dpkg architecture is:\t%s\n", $2}'

# Show the executable format via find and awk for ELF
find $dir -type f -exec file -b {} \; | \
        sort -u | \
        awk '/ELF/ {printf "executable format is: \t\t%s\n", $0}'

rm -rf "$dir"

exit 0

Usage

./foo <deb_file>

Example

% ./foo qtox_1.1\~git20150707.cfeeb03-97_i386.deb

qtox_1.1~git20150707.cfeeb03-97_i386.deb

defined dpkg architecture is:   i386
executable format is :          ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, stripped

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – How to check if installed VLC is 64 bit or 32 bit

Ubuntu – How to detect architecture of a .deb package

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